Holm Oak top tiers

Few places on the planet produce world-class Pinot Noir table wines. The fusspot variety with its small dark berries and tightly packed conical bunches is renowned for being choosy about where it puts down roots.

To begin with, Pinot Noir needs cool to mild growing conditions that are just long enough and warm enough to allow full expression of the variety's characteristic aromas and flavours. As if that isn't challenging enough, finding a suitable site is only a first step in the pursuit of Pinot Noir perfection.

Along the way is a maze of vineyard management issues that must be skilfully navigated. And don't suppose recent trends towards warmer and earlier vintages have made the job any easier for Tasmania's small coterie of growers and winemakers. Their journey to harvest is seldom smooth.

"How we make our Pinot Noir depends on seasonal conditions and the resultant fruit quality we achieve at harvest," explains winemaker Rebecca (Bec) Duffy.

"With Pinot Noir, you need to use your all of your experience and intuition to be able to make a great wine, as doing things the same way as you did them previously often won't work for you every year. That's why making Pinot Noir is so much fun yet so frustrating."

Bec is one half of the dynamic Duffy duo that grows and makes Pinot Noir at Holm Oak Vineyards, north of Launceston. Husband and viticulturist Tim Duffy is the other half. 

Together, the couple have conducted their pursuit of perfect Pinot Noir since 2007. That was their first vintage on the 14ha Rowella site following the departure of previous vineyard owner and co-founder, Nick Butler.

With harvest barely underway in northern Tasmania, this is a crucial time of the year for those involved in the production of premium Pinot Noir. Holm Oak's current portfolio comprises four discretely different Pinot Noir table wines. Then there's a pair of bottle-fermented sparkling wines that rely on significant Pinot Noir composition as well.

The talented Tamar Valley winemaker says picking the variety's tiny, cone-shaped bunches too early – before they have reached optimum flavour and grape sugar ripeness – will result in red table wines that are weak in colour and devoid of flavour.

Delaying harvest to achieve perfect ripeness in the vineyard might increase the likelihood of making top quality Pinot Noir in the winery, but it brings with it increased risks of having vintage marred by rain events or the outbreak of disease.

"This has been a strange year," Duffy admits as she undertakes the fastidious process of berry sampling that will indicate when to give Holm Oak's seasonal pickers the go-ahead for vintage 2020.

"I've been chatting to other growers in the valley in recent weeks, and I'm glad it's not just us that have had challenges. We've not experienced anything similar in previous years. We're really happy with the quality of the fruit we have out in the vineyard, but Tim has had to put in a lot of work for us to get to where we are now."

Back in September, all looked set for an ideal start to a new season. Spring began with slightly warmer and drier conditions than normal throughout the Tamar Valley. October followed with above average daytime temperatures and cooler than average nights. They looked great on paper, but in the vineyard they were accompanied by persistent high winds and unusually low rainfall. These combined to retard shoot growth and make the critical process of shoot-positioning especially time-consuming.

The adverse growing conditions continued into November, with the days cooling, winds becoming gustier and vineyard flowering periods being drawn out over several weeks.

"The other issue we had was that a lot of shoot tips were broken off by the wind we had in November and December," Duffy recalls.

"December was very, very dry. The arrival of January's warmer weather and 40mm of rain brought with it a sudden burst of lateral growth. Our vines soon looked like rows of bushes. It took a lot of work to get them back into a well-managed state once again. February's cooler than average weather also meant we had to do a bit more leaf-plucking than normal to allow bunches to be better exposed to the sun.

"We've had some nice sunny days this week. If this weather continues, we may begin harvest sometime next week. We're a couple of weeks behind, but that's no great drama. During our first seven years on the property, there was only one Pinot Noir wine in our portfolio. Now we have four different wines, we can fine-tune our vineyard management and harvesting to ensure we get the right fruit into the right wine. It also enables us to get the right price recognition we require for all the attention to detail that goes into our top tier wines."

Perfect. Just a matter of tiers before tears.

First published 13 March 2020: tasmaniantimes.com